The Antivanity Mirror by Neil Mendoza is a robotic mirror that won’t let you look at yourself. A perfect gift for the influencer in your life. The piece was originally created entirely from trash while an artist in residence at Recology SF. It was updated for Telfair Museum and is currently on display at their Machines of Futility: Unproductive Technologies exhibition which is open until 12th July 2020.

The mirror is a two way mirror that has a webcam with a wide angle lens hidden behind it. The software to process the camera feed is written in C++ using openFrameworks and uses the deep neural network module in OpenCV to detect faces. The mirror’s motion is controlled by a Teensy using the AccelStepper library. When faces are found, their positions are sent over serial to the microcontroller which moves the mirror until a face is no longer looking at it.

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